It’s a Sun Devil Sweep for the ASU Women’s Golf Team in the NCAA Finals

ASU Sun Devils Return Home as Champions!

Team and Individual NCAA Championships

It would seem that the ASU Women’s Golf Team can’t lose with 22s. That is, it was 22 years ago when the women’s team won both the individual and team NCAA Division I Championships. Kristel Mourgue d’Algue notched the individual championship in 1995. The year before, Emilee Klein and crew did the same thing. Amazingly, the ASU Women’s golf team owns three of the 12 instances when the individual champion was also a member of the championship team.

Monica Vaughn’s dramatic solo win came a day before rallying the troops for a come-from-behind semifinal win over Stanford. They carried that momentum in the championship match, swamping Northwestern in a dominant performance that belies the 3-1-1 final outcome.

In a tournament mired by rain delays, the Sun Devils were firing on all cylinders with Olivia Mehaffey taking the first point of the match from Northwestern’s Sarah Cho, 4 and 3. Teammate Roberta Liti did one better with a 5 and 4 win only minutes after Mehaffey’s.

Although Northwestern still technically had a chance, the writing was on the wall at that point. Monica Vaughn was poised to repeat her extra-holes mastery when the word came in that ASU’s Linnea Strom closed out the Wildcats in the anchor match.

“I’m just so happy for them they get to be national champions for the rest of their lives,” Sun Devils head coach Missy Farr-Kaye told Golf Channel after the win. “That to me is the coolest thing.”

Wins Its 8th NCAA Women’s Golf Championship

With these two wins, the Sun Devil women’s golf team added to an already impressive list of victories – eight NCAA National Championships – the most of any women’s golf program in NCAA history – in 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2009 and 2017.

And not to be left off the list, Cathy Gaughan (1970), Jane Bastanchury-Booth (1969), Carol Sorenson (1962), and Joanna Gunderson-Carner (1960) posted individual national championship wins before women’s sports entered the NCAA.